Orange Belgium and Proximus have signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at covering the Walloon municipalities the least densely populated in fiber optics.
800,000 FTTH sockets
The collaboration between the two operators must lead to the deployment of nearly 1.4 million sockets in households and businesses in areas with low to average population. In other areas, the two operators will continue to deploy their respective networks independently.
In moderately dense areas, Proximus will deploy the fiber via its unifiber joint venture owned with Eurofiber from 600,000 households and premises and the deployed network will then gradually accommodate Orange Belgium customers.
In lower density areas, the two operators will unite their forces to fiber some 200,000 homes and premises with volumes distributed in a fair manner while favoring the most efficient deployment methods at the financial level. Proximus will benefit from access to the Orange Belgium fiber network while Orange Belgium will have access to the proximus fiber network.
In all, this should cover around 70% of Walloon dwellings with a fiber optic network to the house (FTTH).
600,000 for the Hybrid Fiber/Cable network
But the FTTH is not the only network to be used since Proximus can also offer its services to around 600,000 households via the Hybrid Fiber Coax network (HFC) from Orange Beligum.
This complementarity between the two companies will avoid the multiplication of construction sites, will accelerate deployment and also cost operators much less.
The collaboration agreement is expected as soon as possible for the fourth quarter of this year.
Leadership in network infrastructure is one of the major pillars of our “Lead The Future” strategy. Our own HFC network supplemented by our agreements with Wyre already provides 1GBPS access to a national scale. We are very satisfied with the signing of this pre-agreement with Proximus which will allow access to Gigabit networks to a higher number of Walloon households and companies and a disciplined, optimized and responsible FTTH deployment in order to limit road works and customer disturbances as much as possible
Xavier Pichon, Chief Executive Officer at Orange Belgium
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